My little Doodlebugs are certainly not too young to get in on our Moko Jumbie action! They looked at a short clip of some Moko Jumbies in training and saw lots of tricks and we talked about the wonderful colours and costumes that these characters can sometimes be dressed in!

To portray their Moko Jumbies they created a textured background to mimic the sky and then they traced the silhouette of a Moko Jumbie! They added their own colours and decorations to complete our Carnival piece.

The Carnival season is fast approaching and I feel like this term only just started but here we are jumping right into Carnival mode! As we all know Moko Jumbies are an exciting and intriguing part of Carnival culture. The Picassos got a bit of history on what influences brought them to our shores and what they symbolize and then we got right down to watching this short clip of children their age who are learning the Moko Jumbie skills!

Their task today... to draw and paint a Moko Jumbie. To do this they had to decide on their composition... where is the Jumbie doing his dance, what is in the background? They also had to come up with his pose and costume or clothes. Then of course they decide if they will draw one Moko Jumbie or a group. Take a look at what they produced.

To celebrate Carnival the Doodlebugs and Picassos both made Tan Tan puppets! Of course the Doodlebugs had a bit more help putting theirs together but the beauty of this project is that it was simple enough for the little ones to tackle and yet it was also able to engage my older kiddos!

They were all equally fascinated by the movement of the puppet but to put it into perspective we spoke about Peter Minshall's Tan Tan and Saga Boy and I even found an old video of their Dimanche Gras performance for the children to see them live in action! I also learnt that Machel Montano gets waaaay too much credit from these kiddos... when asked to guess who created Tan Tan and Saga Boy most of them were convinced it had to be Machel. lol!

So today they got to explore that good old element of art - form, that we don't often get to delve into, but when we do it's always a Red bull kind of day, but in a good way! They made accordion legs and arms, created faces and clothes for their puppets and we helped the younger group stick the puppet parts together while the Picassos took on everything from start to finish, including using the glue guns under my close supervision... which they totally loved ;) While we worked we also talked about how much work it is to get a mas band put together and asked them to imagine all the people who make headpieces and other parts of costumes and what their jobs must be like!

There may not be very many action shots because as you can appreciate we needed all hands on deck... as a matter of fact I didn't even get pics of most of my Doodlebugs with their completed Tan Tan Puppets :/ but we tried our best to show you a bit of what took place! Shout out to all the aunties, mamas, daddies and grandparents who took on the task of tying the strings for the Doodlebug puppets! A big thank you :)

The Doodlebugs got to make the Pierrot Grenade today :) This was a fun project and they really got into cutting up the paper into strips and of course it goes without saying that any time they get to use glue is a good day!

We chatted about the traditional carnival characters and talked about the Pierrot Grenade and they looked at a few pictures for inspiration.

Once they were familiar with what we were about to do we got right down to it and this is how they turned out!